While experience often affords important knowledge and insight that is difficult to garner through observation or testimony alone, it also has the potential to generate conflicts of interest and unrepresentative perspectives. We call this tension the paradox of experience. In this paper, we first outline appeals to experience made in debates about access to unproven medical products and disability bioethics, as examples of how experience claims arise in bioethics and some of the challenges raised by these claims. We then motivate (...) the idea that experience can be an asset by appealing to themes in feminist and moral epistemology, distinguishing between epistemic and justice-based appeals. Next, we explain the concern that experience may be a liability by appealing to empirical work on cognitive biases and theoretical work about the problem of partial representation. We conclude with preliminary recommendations for addressing the paradox and offer several questions for future discussion. (shrink)

This highly multidisciplinary collection discusses an increasingly important topic among scholars in science and technology studies: objectivity in science. It features eleven essays on scientific objectivity from a variety of perspectives, including philosophy of science, history of science, and feminist philosophy. Topics addressed in the book include the nature and value of scientific objectivity, the history of objectivity, and objectivity in scientific journals and communities. Taken individually, the essays supply new methodological tools for theorizing what is valuable in the pursuit (...) of objective knowledge and for investigating its history. The essays offer many starting points, while suggesting new avenues of research. Taken collectively, the essays exemplify the very virtues of objectivity that they theorize—in reading them together, the reader can sense various anxieties about the dangerously subjective in our age and locate commonalities of concern as well as differences of approach. As a result, the volume offers an expansive vision of a research community seeking a communal understanding of its own methods and its own epistemic anxieties, struggling to enunciate the key problems of knowledge of our time and offer insight into how to overcome them. -/- (Contributors: Alex Csiszar, Scott Edgar, Peter Galison, Ian Hacking, Sandra Harding, Moira Howes, Paolo Savoia, Judy Segal, Joan Steigerwald, and Alison Wylie). (shrink)

Identity politics has been critiqued in various ways. One central problem—the Reinforcement Problem—claims that identity politics reinforces groups rooted in oppression thereby undermining its own liberatory aims. Here I consider two versions of the problem—one psychological and one metaphysical. I defang the first by drawing on work in social psychology. I then argue that careful consideration of the metaphysics of social groups and of the practice of identity politics provides resources to dissolve the second version. Identity politics involves the creation (...) or transformation of groups in ways that do not succumb to the metaphysical Reinforcement Problem. (shrink)

Does neo-Rawlsian political philosophy offer an adequate account of the social conditions of capitalism? In this paper, I present two arguments for thinking that it does not. First, I develop a historicist critique of liberal egalitarianism, arguing that it provides a vision of social reality that is intimately connected to the historical and ideological constellation that I call postwar liberalism, and as such cannot account for social reality since the neoliberal revolutions of the late twentieth century. Second, I explore arguments (...) in Marxist and critical social theory that cast liberal egalitarianism as partial, on account of its inadequate portrait of capitalist society. In surveying responses to these critiques, I argue that merely extending liberal egalitarianism into new domains to account for how contemporary circumstances have changed since the mid-twentieth century cannot address the problem of its partial view of the social world. Taking seriously the insights of critical social theory and the study of capitalism should lead to a challenge to liberal egalitarianism, not an extension of it. (shrink)

That technologies may raise ethical issues is now widely recognised. The ‘responsible innovation’ literature – as well as, to a lesser extent, the applied ethics and bioethics literature – has responded to the need for ethical reflection on technologies by developing a number of tools and approaches to facilitate such reflection. Some of these instruments consist of lists of questions that people are encouraged to ask about technologies – a methodology known as the ‘Socratic approach’. However, to date, these instruments (...) have often not adequately acknowledged various political impacts of technologies, which are, I suggest, essential to a proper account of the ethical issues they raise. New technologies can make some people richer and some people poorer, empower some and disempower others, have dramatic implications for relationships between different social groups and impact on social understandings and experiences that are central to the lives, and narratives, of denizens of technological societies. The distinctive contribution of this paper, then, is to offer a revised and updated version of the Socratic approach that highlights the political, as well as the more traditionally ethical, issues raised by the development of new technologies. (shrink)

Helen Longino's account of objectivity has been highly regarded by both feminist and mainstream philosophers of science. However, I have encountered three feminist philosophers who have all offered one especially compelling feminist critique of Longino's view: far from vindicating or privileging the work of feminist scientists, Longino's account actually requires the active cultivation of anti-feminist and misogynist scientists to balance out the possibility of feminist bias. I call this objection the Nazi problem, for the particular version that claims that her (...) view requires even the active cultivation of Nazi scientists in objective inquiry. In this paper I consider one response to the Nazi problem, which I call the good faith argument. I show that the good faith argument itself is just as objectionable, on feminist grounds, as the Nazi problem it is meant to address. (shrink)

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

Critical diversity studies (CDS) can be found within “traditional,” or “established,” university disciplines, such as philosophy, as well as in relatively newer departments of the university, such as African studies departments, women’s and gender studies departments, and disability studies departments. In this article, therefore, I explain why philosophy of disability, an emerging subfield in the discipline of philosophy, should be recognized as an emerging area of CDS also. My discussion in the article situates philosophy of disability in CDS by both (...) distinguishing this new subfield’s claims about disability from the arguments about disability that mainstream philosophers make and identifying the assumptions about social construction and antiessentialism that philosophy of disability shares with other areas of CDS. The discussion is designed to show that a (feminist) philosophy of disability that draws upon the work of Michel Foucault will transform how philosophers understand the situation of disabled people. By drawing upon Foucault, that is, I offer philosophers of disability and other practitioners of CDS a new understanding of disability as an apparatus of power relations. -/- . (shrink)

Sandra Harding is working on the reconstruction of scientific objectivity. Lorraine Daston argues that objectivity is a concept that has historically evolved. Her account of the development of "aperspectival objectivity" provides an opportunity to see Harding's "strong objectivity" project as a stage in this evolution, to locate it in the history of migration of ideals from moral philosophy to natural science, and to support Harding's desire to retain something of the ontological significance of objectivity.

We propose an account of the subject’s cognition and its relation to the world that allows for an articulation of the phenomenon of ideology. We argue that ideology is a form of what we call ‘a priori activity’: it transcendentally conditions the intelligibility of thought and practice. But we draw from strands of post-Kantian philosophy of science and social philosophy in repudiating Kant’s view that the a priori is necessary and fixed. Instead, we relativize the a priori: we argue that (...) it is contingent, and therefore revisable. More precisely, it is conditioned materially, in that it is enmeshed with and shaped by material social practice. We conclude with some remarks about the possibility of agency over the relativized, materially conditioned a priori—that is, about the possibility of critique. (shrink)

The cultural rise of “big data” in the recent years has pressured a number of occupations to make an epistemological shift toward data-driven science. Though expressed as a professional move, this article argues that the push incorporates gendered assumptions that disadvantage women. Using the human resource occupation as an example, I demonstrate how normative perceptions of feminine “soft skills” are seen as irreconcilable with the masculine “hard numbers” of a data-driven epistemology. The history of human resources reflects how assumptions of (...) a biological fit with an occupation limit what women can convincingly describe as her skillsets. However, challenging this cannot stay within the confines of the occupation itself. To undo sexist thinking, it is necessary to understand the broader networks of patriarchal power that dictate how value is defined in corporate environments, especially within other high status professions in business. (shrink)

This research critically analyses patriarchal practices of male family members in terms of social relationships in businesses of women. The extant literature, which seeks to explore the negative influences of the family on women’s entrepreneurship, mostly revolves around the impact of patriarchal segregation of work on businesses. As such, it concentrates almost exclusively on the aspect of material gains through domestic responsibilities and childcare of women at the household sphere. This feminist study takes the debate forward with novel insights on (...) how menfolk of the family dominate, oppress and exploit women by directly getting involved in small businesses of women in a highly patriarchal developing nation, Bangladesh. From the interviews of the women business-owners, it is established that businesses of some women are adversely affected by male relatives’ social practices that are not tied to the domestic modes of production. Thus, the article significantly contributes to the understanding on gender subordination in women’s entrepreneurship from the narrow concentration on material gains of male family members to a more nuanced view of social practices. (shrink)

Identity politics is commonly criticized as endangering democracy by undermining community, rational communication, and solidarity. Drawing on both radical democratic theory and standpoint theory, this article posits the opposite thesis: identity politics is pivotal for the democratization of democracy. Democratization through identity politics is achieved by disrupting hegemonic discourse and is, therefore, a matter of power, while such forms of power politics are reasonable when following minority standpoints generated through identity politics. The article develops this approach by connecting radical democratic (...) theories with standpoint theories and highlighting their commonalities and potential for mutual enhancement. Standpoint theory allows us to substantiate and reconcile two initially contradictory claims: particular minority standpoints are necessary to criticize the prevailing discursive and institutional orders, and these standpoints stem from intersubjective reason and embody ‘strong objectivity.’ This discussion presents a new perspective on the tension between particularity and universality, as well as the relationship between power and reason in democracy. Democratization is an oscillation between these polarities, and political theory should not aim to resolve this tension but to recognize and articulate it. Such recognition might involve elevating knowledge emerging from oppressed groups and exercising epistemic modesty when assessing specific forms of identity politics. (shrink)

At first blush, the notion a “feminist epistemology” appears, at best, peculiar—not, as Sandra Harding suggests, because “‘woman the knower’ appears to be a contradiction in terms” but because it is hard to see how an epistemology, a philosophical theory of knowledge, can be either feminist or anti-feminist since it is not clear how such a theory might benefit or harm women.

Many questions may be asked about the efforts to construct feminist epistemologies. One such question is whether epistemologies really imply values and practices in any significant way. Another is whether the values and practices most epistemologies are taken to be immersed in are indeed masculine. Yet another is what precisely are the feminist values and practices that feminist epistemologies should involve. A fourth is whether women and men really do think so differently from each other. And a fifth possible question (...) is whether feminist epistemologies should be separatist, i.e., such that only women can use and construct them, or whether they should be universal human epistemologies. Although all these questions merit serious discussion, I shall here deal only with the last, assuming, at least for the sake of argument, that the first, second and fourth questions receive positive answers, and that there is a satisfying answer for the third. (shrink)

Development is entrenched within a Western, hegemonic framework. This can lead one to wonder if development ethics is, in fact, possible. Too many decisions are made and too many policies dominate an international development agenda that are guided by economic forces and national self-interests. Although development ethics has attempted to break through this situation, it has not had the impact that is needed. The current practice of ethics in development is too weak to have the impact needed to generate truly (...) desirable change. In this paper, I offer some reflections and argue for a strong ethical approach in development. (shrink)

There are few aphorisms in Minima Moralia that display a less sympathetic attitude towards their subject than “They, the people”(§ 7). Adorno denounces the “amor intellectualis for [the] kitchen personnel” in the subsequent aphorism, but “They, the people” already seems to confirm all suspicions about the alleged elitism of critical theory. The idea that intellectuals mostly encounter those less educated when “illiterates come to intellectuals wanting letters written for them” is laughable, even for the 1950s, and the claim that, among (...) the “underdogs”,“envy and spite surpass anything seen among literati or musical directors”(ibid.) oozes with contempt, no matter how much Adorno insists that these alleged character deficits result from the social structures in which uneducated, working class people find themselves. Yet the point of Adorno’s remarks is not to disprove a deferential form of a Lukácsian “standpoint theory …. (shrink)

The conventional proper scientific self has an ethical obligation to strive to see everywhere in the universe from no particular location in that universe: he is to produce the view from nowhere. What different conceptions of the proper scientific self are created by the distinctive assumptions and research practices of social justice movements, such as feminism, anti-racism, and post-colonialism? Three such new ideals are: the multiple and conflicted knowing self; the researcher strategically located inside her research world; and the community (...) that knows. (shrink)

Artykuł pokazuje, jak feministyczna teoria punktu widzenia może być wykorzystana do badania marginalizacji głosów kobiet i pomijania ich wiedzy i doświadczeń w polskim dyskursie publicznym. W pierwszej części tekstu przybliżone zostały teorie, z których czerpał ten nurt badań feministycznych, z naciskiem na heglowską i marksowską dialektykę, oraz w jaki sposób przekształca je on w celu dostosowania ich do analizy problemu dyskryminacji kobiet. W drugiej części z kolei wykorzystałem omówioną wcześniej aparaturę pojęciową do przeanalizowania wypowiedzi dwóch liberalnych intelektualistów związanych bardziej lub (...) mniej pośrednio z tematyką macierzyństwa i wychowania dzieci – Jacka Żakowskiego z wywiadu dla „Super Expressu” i Zbigniewa Mikołejki w postaci jego felietonu „Wojna z wózkowymi”. (shrink)

This article examines the tension in Hannah Arendt’s thought between the creativity of political action and the worldlessness of labour in light of fieldwork with feminist activists in Mexico City. Drawing from my ethnographic research, I explore how labour and action are knitted together in the feminist practice of accompanying women who seek safe abortion in the city. Bringing Arendt’s thought into dialogue with anthropologies of illness experience as well as the reflections of my interlocutors in the field, I shift (...) from an approach to the situation of abortion as a decision-making event, to ask other questions about autonomy and dependency, freedom and necessity, mortality and political life. I argue that what is interesting about Arendt’s conceptualisation of the labouring body is not that she separates ‘bare life’ from the political sphere of ‘men’, but rather that it alerts us to the uncertain way our life is implicated with others. In conclusion, I argue that feminist accompaniment networks foster an ephemeral relation of care between activists and women in situations of abortion, one that invites us to re-imagine the temporality of political action and to ask, again, what it is to make a new world versus make this world livable. (shrink)

Some decades ago, Heidi Hartmann lamented that “[t]he ‘marriage’ between marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism.”[1] By this, she meant that attempts at a feminist theory had ultimately collapsed into marxism, and so succeeded only in rendering sex inequality derivative of, hence, secondary to class inequality, and as such to be overcome only by ending class inequality. These attempts were (...) in a sense self-defeating, negating the need from which they had emerged, the need for feminism as such. In 1982, Catharine MacKinnon confronted and attempted to remedy this. She developed a theory of sexuality as to feminism what work is to marxism, and thereby elevated feminism to a theory of the kind that marxism is, parallel rather than subordinate to it. She thus made sex inequality finally the issue. But, paradoxically, at the very same time, MacKinnon paralysed feminism, for she revealed men’s oppression of women as unknowable. If men’s oppression of women is unknowable, then feminism, as the movement to end that oppression, is impossible. Susan Bernick recognised this, saying, “MacKinnon’s legacy to feminism is the impossibility of any future feminism. Her account makes feminism theoretically impossible.”[2] This makes the most urgent task for feminism that of explaining how women can know men’s oppression of them. In this thesis, I attempt such an explanation. (shrink)

The focus of this dissertation is to identify, analyze, and critique what I take to be a fundamental contradiction between the ideal mission of the university to serve as the site for the pursuit of truth and the function of Traditionalist humanities curriculums. I argue that because nationalist education makes it nearly impossible for students to engage in the critique of ideology, nationalist education is antithetical to the university's mission. With anything less than the ability to engage in this critique (...) of ideology, there is no way that students can participate meaningfully in the ideal of the university. ;In the opening chapter I argue first, that the development and preservation of national culture stands in a dialectical relation to the preservation and contestation of national identity; second, that post-secondary education in the arts and humanities is largely education in the national culture; and third, that nationalism mediates the dialectical relation between national culture and national identity. In the second chapter I critique nationalism on the grounds that underlying every nationalist movement is a universalist project which denies the reality of complex personal identity formation. ;In the third chapter I show that the Traditionalist position seeks to support through curricular control nationalist versions of culture and identity. ;In the fourth chapter I critique Marx's and Mannheim's theories of ideology since they seek to devise methods for evaluating ideology through epistemic standpoints removed from the site of the production of ideology. And thus I conclude this chapter by asserting that in order to be a critic of ideology one must struggle with and acknowledge multiple and complex social identities. ;In the final chapter I defend the claim that nationalist education undermines the process of teaching students to be critics of ideology since such an education prevents students from engaging the complexity of the encounter between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge. Moreover, I argue that a decidedly non-nationalist multicultural education offers the possibility of developing heterogeneous group identity without the deleterious consequences invariably brought forth by nationalism. (shrink)

I examine a problem or dilemma of legitimation faced by the critical theorist who takes as the object of his or her critique a totality of which she or he is a part. The dilemma is that the theorist must either illegitimately exempt her critical theory from the determining influences of the totality or lose normative authority. The critics I examine in detail are: Adorno and Horkheimer; Kant; Hegel; feminist standpoint epistemologists, in particular, Sandra Harding; Irigaray; Foucault; and Arendt. ;I (...) conclude that a purely theoretical or epistemic ground for the legitimacy of totalizing critique is impossible; philosophical critique must involve an extra-rational faith or a political commitment. However, I also argue that the project of theoretical grounding should not be abandoned. I continue this project by drawing out of the critical theorists I examined some preliminary concepts and strategies that may, after further development, serve to provide a theory of the legitimacy of critical philosophy. (shrink)